“If Samy Kamkar plays his cards right, he may be allowed to visit MySpace again in just a few months. For the time being, however, he’s not even allowed to touch a computer, following a January 2007 guilty plea for creating what many consider to be the first Web 2.0 worm: the Samy worm.

Samy’s worm wasn’t malicious, but it did force News Corp.’s MySpace social-networking site to shut down in late 2005 after forcing more than 1 million users to declare Samy a “hero” on their profile pages.

Last week, Samy, who is now 21, made his first public appearance since his conviction, attending the OWASP App Sec 2007 conference, hosted by eBay, in San Jose, California. He was treated like a celebrity at the show, but there were some complications. Under the terms of his plea agreement, he can only use computers for work, so he was forced to show slides that he’d dictated to a friend on a computer that was operated by a conference staffer.

It’s not easy being a computer geek cut off from computers, but if Samy remains a model parolee, he could be allowed to use computers again in a couple of months. He talked to IDG News Service about what life has been like since his arrest and what he plans to do as soon as he’s online again.”

Excuse the “Myspace Victim” photo above. I’ve said this on every single “virus/wom writer busted” article, and I’ll continue to do so — a worm or virus that doesn’t actually do any real damage should translate into an instant job offer, NOT a conviction… well in a perfect world. In case you were interested in viewing the XSS code, you can find it, and it’s explanation here.